


Break Statement

by levendis



Series: Prompt Fics [110]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Bad Decisions, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Unhealthy Relationships, cuddlecore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-16
Updated: 2017-05-16
Packaged: 2018-11-01 14:07:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10923390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/levendis/pseuds/levendis
Summary: Push the rock up the hill, rock falls down the hill. Push the rock up the hill, rock falls down the hill. Push the rock -





	Break Statement

**Author's Note:**

> for anon, who prompted: a Twelvedole scenario where one reason why Nardole is so fed up with Twelve going in the vault all the time is that Nardole is left with picking up the pieces when Twelve reemerges hearts-broken, troubled and worn out by Koschei

It’s one of those nights where the sky’s weirdly clear. Despite light pollution and regular pollution and the omnipresent cloud cover, there’s still stars out. Or satellites, close enough. The out-there, the away-from-here, visible from campus grounds.

The Doctor’s sitting on a bench, neck craned up at the sky, all the satellites and suns and all the space in between. On the bench in full view from their office windows; this is the first step. Nardole's in the office by the windows watching the Doctor on the bench watching the sky. The Doctor knows Nardole is watching - this isn’t where they go when they want to hide - and the satellites do too, probably, considering the unsubtle monitoring UNIT’s been doing. Nardole worries at a pen he’d grabbed from the jar of pens and screwdrivers on the Doctor’s desk. Click-top clicked in and out and in and out. 

The Doctor leans forward, hands on their face in a familiar gesture. Step two. They stand up and wander across the grass, past the ‘Keep Off The Grass’ sign. Step three. Clicking in and out and in and out and in and out. The Doctor doesn’t look up, to the window where Nardole is watching, and Nardole does not make any move to stop them, does not even entertain the thought.

(He’d tried, once; the attempt had ended poorly.)

Around the corner of the building, to where the door to the vault is. Nardole steps away from the window, closes the curtains, sits down on the couch. Hands clenched into fists, listening to himself tick. One second, two seconds, three seconds, step four. There’s dust on the lamps and papers in disarray and, somehow, a stray sock under the desk; he whirrs up and busies himself putting things back into place, a paper towel folded halfwise then lengthwise carefully wiped over every recently-neglected surface. Bookcase back into alphabetical order.

Brecht after Asimov and before Butler. The faces of spines aligned, a smooth, flat front.

“Won’t be able to find a damn thing, now,” the Doctor says, from the doorway where they inevitably reappear, nights like these.

Nardole slowly, carefully, finishes reshelving a fantasy quarterly from 2072, then stills. “You know no one else understands your ‘organizational system’. Bill comes by, she’s not expecting things to be in order of when you met the author.”

The Doctor huffs out a laugh, in a way that implies that nothing is actually funny, just that they couldn’t come up with a better reaction. “Good night, Nardole.”

“Sleep tight,” Nardole responds automatically, staring at the bookshelf. 

Parts one through four of the young adult trilogy that’ll take the world by storm next year, Z in a parallel-universe edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, a manual for a lawn mower, poetry from the early days of Earth’s colonizing of space. Or later days, one of those.

 

 

* * *

 

The sun is shining, bizarrely, and the grounds are filled with bright young things, all too loud and too carefree or too focused on the wrong things. Nardole pushes through them, the boy with a guitar and the girl drinking wine out of a thermos and the study group cross-legged around a stack of practice tests. Motors at max speed still equates to a quite slow average velocity: an eternity, then, under the hot sun before he makes the dark, damp cool of the basement. And the vault door, still in place, still locked. Double-locked, triple-locked.

Nardole goes to bang on the door, and then stops. And then starts again, and then stops. And then places his hand flat against it, and then withdraws, and then finally makes a fist and pounds on it. The sound landing flatly, unimpressively. His hand hurts anyway.

“It’s cruel, what you’re doing,” he says. “I s'pose you know that, and that’s probably the fun, isn’t it.”

Chopsticks, played haltingly.

 

 

* * *

 

The Doctor on the bench with their neck craned up at the sky. Nardole at the window swallowing his heart back down his throat. Everything in the office is spotless. Books in linear chronological order, Bill’s latest essay centered on the desk. Something about momentum, about movement. _The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner: The Lorentz Transformation and Time Dilation._

Nardole on the couch with his hands in fists and the clock ticking, and the other clock ticking at just slightly, annoyingly, the wrong speed. Lagging just a touch behind. The door opens softly, and closes equally softly, and since he’s staring at the carpet his barometer of the situation here is just how the Doctor sighs, and the quiet scritch of whatever movement they’re making, cloth against cloth.

Step five, the Doctor leaves and Nardole heads off to bed. Except the Doctor’s not moving, this time. The clock is ticking and the clock is ticking and Nardole’s digging his nails into his palms. Could do with a manicure, been a while.

“Alright?” he asks, flicking his eyes up at the Doctor and then back down at the audiovisual device in his lap paused in the middle of a video about kittens.

The Doctor laughs, not-laughs, that noise they make when nothing is actually funny. “No,” they say.

Nardole turns his telephone off and tucks it into his waistcoat pocket. Movements careful, telegraphed. And he looks up.

“I’m not fine,” the Doctor says, smiling. All wide wild eyes, red-rimmed and exhausted. “Par for the course, really. Nothing to worry about.”

There are a hundred things he could say here but all of them feel wrong, or too risky, so he just pats the couch cushion next to him and says, “C'mon, I found this video of a bird doing a silly dance, you need to watch it. Looks just like you when you think you’re being impressive.”

 

 

* * *

 

The vault door is quintuple-locked. Physical, digital, quantum, your mother’s maiden name and what you had for tea yesterday, thumbprint and retinal scan and a pass/fail on whether you mean well. The air cold and damp and still, puddles on the floor and something dripping rhythmically somewhere.

Nardole presses his hand flat to the door and scrunches his eyes closed and just thinks. _Maybe if you could find it in yourself to stop encouraging this. Maybe if you could, for once, be kind._

There’s no answer.

 

 

* * *

 

It’s been drizzling all day and all night, grey-overcast, a blank isolated nothing of a rotation around a sun no one in this city can see. Sunset is just an abrupt dimming, the darkness drawing close and heavy. This morning’s lecture was about the various deaths of Russian cosmonauts, and it was downhill from there.

One pen going clicky-clicky-click and two windows with a view of the bench and three books he’s not sure should be classified under editor or topic and four steps from the window to the desk, four from the desk to the back-room door, four from the door to the sofa. Step five.

Six AM, the door roughly opened and left ajar. “Morning,” Nardole says.

The Doctor leans on the doorframe, smiling crookedly at the nothing at all that is funny here.

“You’re a mess, you know that?”

“How is this news?” The Doctor slumps slightly, catches themselves, wincing.

If a given action leads to a certain outcome, every time. If a choice is wrong and you keep making that choice. If all of this goes to the same place and that place isn’t where you should be. If all of this leads here. What’s that say, then, about you?

The Doctor looks like they’re about to fall over. They look like something hurts. If Nardole didn’t know better, he’d think they look like they’re about to start crying.

The clock and the clock ticking, ticking. He stands up. Clunks across the carpet, motors whirring. Hovers a hand above the Doctor’s shoulder, and then thinks better of it, and then changes his mind. The Doctor closes their eyes at the touch, swaying. Nardole screws up his courage and goes in for the hug. Risky maneuver, this, like petting a feral cat.

“Is this okay?” he asks, arms wrapped firmly around the Doctor. No answer. “I’ll take that as a yes, then.”

He shuffles them towards the sofa and sets the both of them down awkwardly, trying not to squish the Doctor, who now seems impossibly small and fragile. This skinny shivering arsehole flinching at specific points of contact, like some things in particular hurt for reasons Nardole doesn’t need to know. They wind up in a half-comfortable tangle, the Doctor’s head on his chest and bony elbow digging into his gut, hair in his mouth whenever he opens it to say something and then think better of it.

They sit there for a while.

“Have you considered learning from your mistakes and not doing this so much,” Nardole says, delicately spitting out a stray curl of the Doctor’s hair.

“All the time,” the Doctor says. They shift, turn in, arm out of attack-elbow mode and sent sprawling across him. “I know, okay? I know.”

“First step to recovery is admitting you have a problem,” Nardole says, patting the Doctor on the back.

“Fuck off.”

“Shut up.” He breathes in and breathes out, and listens to the Doctor breathing in and out, and how they’re both tapping a foot against the floor, and how the clocks are ticking.

The sky’s lightening, dark grey to a slightly less dark grey. Sunrise, presumably, though who knows these days. Could be an alien invasion or something. The Doctor’s hand curls into Nardole’s side, pulling at his jumper. They breath in, and out, just slightly out of sync. Step six.


End file.
